The BBC is reporting that MySpace have announced that they will sell their search feature to find other people on their site to one of the ‘big three’; Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google. This is possibly a very good move for them, for two reasons. Firstly, it establishes them as the ‘official’ social network, if a ‘Google People’ search has a little ‘Powered by Myspace’ button underneath it. In the social networking space, it matters hugely what network your peers use, so if you percieve one product as the market leader you are more likely to signup and use it. Thus MySpace could further secure its position at the top, becoming the market leader not only in terms of %, but also in perception.
The other advantage for MySpace is the more obvious one - driving yet more traffic to their website. The increased exposure from such a deal would definitely help them to reach people outside the 18-25 demographic, something that they are already trying to do with products such as the recently launched MySpace careers. It has become clear that they are trying to become a service where people of all ages list themselves, and a search on a big site would help them.
What’s less clear is the benefits for the search provider. The only reason that I can see for a search engine buying the right to do MySpace search would be a desire to piggy-back on the networks phenomenal success. Without actually buying MySpace the level of integration needed to successfully piggy-back would be impossible. If I were Eric Schmidt or Bill Gates, there is no way I would buy MySpace search.
Something I might do, though, is produce a general social network search. It would be very simple; identify the domains of the social networks you want to search, add in some extra operators like ’status:single’ and some semantic text analysis (which in this context would probably be quite easy) and then you would have a search engine that was as good, if not better, than one you could buy from MySpace. On a side note, Google would never buy MySpace search anyway, because they already own Orkut, which presumably they still hope will take off at some point. The same goes for Yahoo, with their ‘360′ product, and to a lesser extent with Microsoft, with their MSN/Windows Live quasi-social network with Spaces etc.
